Hong Kong publisher and democracy advocate
Jimmy Lai
faces up to life in prison for daring to speak the truth about the Communist Party. But U.K. Prime Minister
Rishi Sunak
couldn’t manage even to utter Mr. Lai’s name in Parliament this month.
Tory MP Iain
Duncan Smith
raised Mr. Lai’s plight during the Prime Minister’s Questions on Jan. 11. He noted that Mr. Lai is “a British citizen and a British passport holder” and asked Mr. Sunak to “warn the Chinese government” that “the use of Common Law in Hong Kong will be taken away” if authorities persist in using the city’s national-security law to silence the brave newspaperman.
There was no such commitment from Mr. Sunak, who in the usual Parliamentary fashion thanked Mr. Duncan Smith for his “continued engagement on this critical issue.” He added that the U.K. has already provided “refuge” for hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers and was “standing up to what we believe to be Chinese aggression and indeed an undermining of the settlement that we fought so hard to achieve.”
Mr. Sunak concluded by saying he would “continue to remain engaged and robust on this” and would hold further discussions on “this particular issue.” But public shaming matters more to Chinese officials and their Hong Kong apparatchiks than more limp engagement and discussion.
And real consequences count for even more. After the Communist Party criminalized dissent by imposing a national-security law, the U.S. responded by sanctioning 11 officials involved in “undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy and restricting the freedom of expression or assembly of the citizens of Hong Kong.”
Those sanctioned by the U.S. include former chief…
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